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Krakatoa’s chilling effect

Krakatoa's long term effect on climate change, plus journalism awards for junk …

Paid up oil men and inveterate skeptics look away now. Yes, it's time for another climate change post. First up, a paper published in this week's Nature. Critics of anthropogenic climate change often bring up volcanoes in their attempts to dispute the established scientific opinion. "But" they cry, "a volcano pumps out huge amounts of CO2, more than we could hope to," followed by some figures that usually turn out to be an order of magnitude less than the CO2 emissions of the US for a given year.

So what about volcanoes? Yes, they do release CO2 into the atmosphere, but they do more than that. When you take several million tons of rock and blow it into tiny little pieces, you end up with ash, and lots of it. So much, in fact, that along with breathtaking sunsets come severely affected climates. Following the huge eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, enough reflective volcanic aerosols were ejected into the atmosphere that the following year was exceptionally cold around the globe. But the effects of that debris have been much longer-lived. According to the report in Nature* this week, the volcanic-induced cooling of the oceans caused by Krakatoa's eruption lasted almost a century, enough to offset a large amount of anthropogenic rises in ocean temperature and sea level. In plain english, were it not for Krakatoa going boom all those years ago, we'd be in a worse state currently than we are. According to the authors:

An oceanic response to the 1991 Pinatubo eruption, which was comparable to Krakatoa in terms of its radiative forcing, has been identified in satellite altimetry data. The simulated heat-content recovery after Pinatubo seems to occur much more rapidly than for Krakatoa. This disparity arises because the Pinatubo response is superimposed on a non-stationary background of large and increasing greenhouse-gas forcing. The heat-content effects of Pinatubo and other eruptions in the late twentieth century are offset by the observed warming of the upper ocean, which is primarily due to anthropogenic influences.

Another favorite of climate change skeptics is the author Michael Crichton. Crichton penned the novel State of Fear, which uses a load of discredited and fallacious arguments to attempt to disprove the reality of climate change, but which only succeeds in convincing this reader that his best work was written in the 1960s. What do you do when a fictional work takes a position you like? Call it journalism, of course! That's what the American Association of Petroleum Geologists have done. The AAPG have given Crichton their journalism award this year:

"It is fiction," conceded Larry Nation, communications director for the association. "But it has the absolute ring of truth."

Unlike the AAPG, who are hardly going to be the most objective bunch
when it comes to this topic, State of Fear is widely reviled amongst
the rest of the scientific community:

The book is "demonstrably garbage," Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford climatologist, said in an interview yesterday. Petroleum geologists may like it, he said, but only because "they are ideologically connected to their product, which fills up the gas tanks of Hummers."

Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who directs the Harvard University Center for the Environment, called the award "a total embarrassment" that he said "reflects the politics of the oil industry and a lack of professionalism" on the association's part.

As for the book, he added, "I think it is unfortunate when somebody who has the audience that Crichton has shows such profound ignorance."

Finally on the topic, in a time when science and religion are so often set at odds in the media, it is wonderful to see that this need not always be the case. A group of 86 evangelical Christian leaders have come together to help raise awareness about climate change in the US.

"We have not paid as much attention to climate change as we should, and that's why I'm willing to step up," said Duane Litfin, president of Wheaton College, an influential evangelical institution in Illinois. "The evangelical community is quite capable of having some blind spots, and my take is this has fallen into that category."

Tellingly though, notorious figures such as James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, and Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention are deeply opposed to this move. One has to wonder if, like Ralph Reed, they're opposing the notion of climate change on behalf of corporate sponsors?